Reading Notes by Lisa Blasch
Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light
I'll begin this overview by briefly retelling one particular event
which seems to me to capture a key aspect of Jacques Lusseyran's
narrative and thus provide a basic context for discussing more
specific aspects of the book. Early in his relationship with Jean,
Lusseyran advised him of the importance of moving beyond the inner
life and fully engaging the outer. Although he was receptive to his
friend's counsel, Jean's disposition created a kind of insolubility
which he found difficult to overcome. Lusseyran explains that the
journey to connect one's own life to the richness of the outerworld
begins when we shed the burdensome task of separating the world into
that which is ours, and that which is not. He says to him: "There is
only one world. Things outside exist if you go to meet them with
everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will
never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in."
Neither world is fully real until it is interpenetrated by the
other.
The faculty of seeing is only one way in which we have access to the
world around us. From our limited standpoint, we divide it in half
&endash; into the inner and the outer worlds &endash; and then
discover great difficulties associated with identifying ourselves too
closely with one side or the other. Fixating our attention on
appearances and externalities, we find that the inner life becomes a
mystery. Being absorbed with the inner life, however, produces
isolation and suffering. Either option is dangerous, because these
attitudes are the source of shallow ignorance, the vulgarity of
violence and the hopelessness of despair.
Lusseyran's childhood blindness opened his senses in a way which
revealed the interdependence of everything. Light is a metaphor for
the world's substantial unity. With the loss of his sight, his
remaining senses became more acute and worked in tandem to
re-establish access to the world. He begins to see without the use of
his eyes through a radical openness to external objects. By allowing
objects to come toward him on their own and proceeding to feel them
from a distance, he soon learns to distinguish their qualities from
one another. By his new light he perceives one substance from which
everything is made and in which everything participates.
Most importantly, this substance is moral as well as physical. The
infinite potential of human relationships illustrates this. Lusseyran
describes humanity as one flesh with the same desires and
limitations, therefore we learn about ourselves and the world by
adopting the same radical comportment to people as he takes to the
physical world. Because our individual lives are already bound
together in this way, our happiness and survival depends upon
creating and strengthening interdependence rather than destroying it.
Love and friendship are best of all, then, because they make growth
and flourishing very real and joyous prospects.
Understanding human relations in this way translates into a code of
social and political virtues. Lusseyran describes his education as a
study of harmonizing the present with the past to form a coherent
wholeness. The subjects of philosophy, literature and history brought
to bear on one another led him to the realization that freedom is an
essential right of all humanity. This is not merely political freedom
or the right to do what one wants. Instead it is something more
meaningful, a basic capacity to be self-determining in accordance
with our situation. To have this requires allowing others to have it
as well. This illuminates the immorality of war. While Lusseyran's
dramatic heroes avoided war by reasoning with one another, using
"persuasion, calculated with passion but to reach reconciliation,"
there are other people who turn eternal virtues on their head by
doing violence to others in the name of honor and duty. To love war
&endash; even the idea of it - must be on Lusseyran's terms one of
the worst moral conditions imaginable, a kind of outer
darkness' based on the same conceptual blindness he counsels Jean
against. All of this explains the ethics of the resistance as a
political movement. We can't always stop wars through reasoned
argumentation, because warmongers either don't understand or are
incapable of caring about the need to universalize human freedom.
Even working to resist the global expansion of a political regime
brings the threat of brutality and violence, however we affirm the
essential "moral structure" of the universe when we display the
courage to defend humanity and endure violence by loving and aiding
one another. Yet, Lusseyran's Buchenwald experiences demonstrate his
belief that not even the proximity of death can negate the
emancipatory potential of devoting oneself to these things.